Guantánamo Hunger Strike Is Largely Over, U.S. Says

WASHINGTON — The military on Monday effectively pronounced the end of a mass hunger strike among detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — a six-month protest that at one point swept through a majority of the inmate population, refocused global attention on the prison, and pushed the Obama administration to revive the effort to shutter it.

In a statement and an interview, a prison spokesman, Lt. Col. Samuel House, said on Monday the military would no longer issue daily updates on the number of inmates participating in the protest, eligible for force-feeding or hospitalized, as had been its practice over the past few months, because the participation has fallen away from its peak two months ago.

“Following July 10, 2013, the number of hunger strikers has dropped significantly, and we believe today’s numbers represent those who wish to continue to strike,” he said. “As always, our medical professionals will continue to monitor and evaluate the detainees while providing them with the appropriate level of care. From this point forward we will respond to queries on hunger strikes individually.”

While about seven detainees at the prison have been on a strike for years, a larger protest had begun by early March and quickly gained steam. At its peak, 106 of the 166 prisoners at the time were listed as participants by the military’s official count. But since Sept. 11, just 19 of the 164 detainees now at the base have been participating, according to the military.

David Remes, a lawyer for several Guantánamo detainees, said participation had fallen off because detainees had largely achieved their goals.

“I think the hunger strike ended because the men achieved their objectives,” Mr. Remes said. “As far as I know, Korans are not being searched. Guantánamo has returned to the national agenda. And President Obama has renewed efforts to close it. And, frankly, six months is a long time to be on a hunger strike.”

Colonel House, however, said that the policy and practice of searching Korans had not changed. But he said the military authorities were now letting detainees who do not want their Korans to be searched to turn the books in, which has alleviated some tensions. It was not clear how many detainees had elected not to keep a Koran in their cell.

The spark for the hunger strike is disputed. Lawyers for detainees say that it traces back to a particularly intrusive search of their cells for contraband in which detainees were angered by guards’ looking through their Korans, which they considered sacrilegious.

The military said that its policy and practice for searching Korans — in which Muslim linguists, not uniformed guards, flipped through the pages — was unchanged and that the allegations of some kind of different treatment of Korans in a routine shakedown in February were just an excuse by leaders among the prisoners to rally a broader protest.

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A chair in which detainees were force-fed this summer. At one point, dozens required force-feeding under a military policy.CreditJoe Raedle/Getty Images

But both detainee lawyers and military officials agreed that the underlying cause of the protest was the growing despair of the inmates over whether they would ever go home alive.

Transfers of low-level prisoners dried up after early 2011, when Congress imposed strict restrictions on repatriations to countries with troubled security conditions, and in January the Obama administration reassigned the State Department official charged with negotiating transfers and did not replace him.

The protest escalated in the spring, as detainees in the communal cellblocks — home to inmates most compliant with prison rules — began covering security cameras and refusing to go into their cells for nightly lockdowns, effectively barring guards from being able to monitor what was happening and police the common areas.

In early April, Rear Adm. John W. Smith Jr., the commander of the prison joint task force, ordered a predawn raid on the communal cell blocks, forcing all the detainees into a lockdown in separate cells. He and other prison officials said they feared that a detainee would commit suicide by starving himself, hidden from the cameras.

The raid and its aftermath intensified the hunger strike for a time. It also focused attention on the military’s policy of force-feeding detainees who had lost too much weight with a nutritional supplement through gastric tubes inserted through their noses, a practice that medical ethics groups denounced.

When dozens of detainees began requiring force-feeding, the military brought additional nurses and corpsmen to the base to assist in the procedure. At one point, a federal judge rejected a legal motion to block the practice, saying she had no authority to intervene, but pointedly urged Mr. Obama to address the issues raised by the strike.

The State Department in June also appointed a new envoy, Cliff Sloan, to work on issues related to closing Guantánamo. The Pentagon belatedly moved to start holding parole-board-like hearings for detainees designated to be held without trial, a procedure the administration had announced two years earlier. The first such hearing, for a Yemeni named Mahmoud al Mujahid, is scheduled for Nov. 8.

Meanwhile, earlier in July, at the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan — when communal prayers are particularly important to observant Muslims — the military began moving compliant detainees back into communal housing. To be eligible, the detainees could not be on a hunger strike.

Colonel House said that about 100 of the detainees were now living in communal cellblock conditions again.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A3 of the New York edition with the headline: Guantánamo Hunger Strike Is Largely Over, U.S. Says. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe